Tool
What does a home server cost to run?
A server's real price isn't the box — it's the box plus years of electricity. Put in a wattage and your unit rate, and this page turns it into a number you can argue with.
The rest of the day counts as idle.
- Energy per year
- 66 kWh
- Running cost
- £18/yr
- £1.48/month
- 5-year total
- £317
- hardware + electricity
Watts × hours × your unit rate — no rounding tricks. Measure real draw at the wall with a plug-in energy monitor; PSU ratings overstate it wildly.
The maths is simple: watts × hours × your unit rate. What people get wrong is using a power supply's rated wattage instead of what the machine actually draws. A "500 W" old desktop idles at 50–70 W; an N100 mini PC idles at about 6 W measured at the wall. At 27p/kWh, that difference is roughly £120 a year — every year the server is plugged in.
Typical measured figures, for orientation: a mini PC draws 6–10 W idle and 15–25 W transcoding; each spinning hard drive adds 5–8 W; an old desktop pressed into server duty idles at 40–80 W. One always-on 6 W box costs about £14 a year at the current UK price cap; an 80 W tower costs about £190.
Some links on this page are affiliate links — they cost you nothing extra and never change what I recommend. Full disclosure
Don’t guess your numbers — measure them. A plug-in energy monitor costs about a tenner, reads true wall draw, and settles every argument this page starts. Measure idle overnight and a transcode for ten minutes, then put the real figures in above.
